Caetano da Costa Alegre, (born April 26, 1864, São Tomé, Portuguese Africa—died April 18, 1890, Alcobaça, Port.) first significant black African poet writing in Portuguese to deal with the theme of blackness. He was the literary ancestor to the later, more vehement modern poets.

Alegre was born into a creole family but moved in 1882 to Portugal, where he enrolled in the Medical School of Lisbon. Before he could graduate and fulfill his desire to become a doctor in the navy, however, he died of tuberculosis at the age of 26. It was not until 1916 that his friend, the journalist Cruz Magalhães, collected and published Alegre’s poetry as Versos.

Colour dominates the poetry of Alegre. Rejected by a Portuguese woman whom he loved, he laments his blackness, yet he exalts black women. In one of his more famous poems, he confesses “My colour is black / It stands for mourning and grief.” He misses his island home and his African heritage. Time and again he expresses his racial alienation and his personal suffering, but at times he does so with ironic self-mockery. Technically, Alegre’s poetry is rooted in the Romantic mode that dominated much 19th-century Portuguese verse. Using traditional imagery of the time, the lyrical poet in his works compares love to a rose and his beloved to a dove. He chooses the sonnet form in such poems as “Aurora” and “Longe,” and his personal, confessional style is far removed from traditional African oral poetry. Nevertheless, Alegre is an African poet who contributed greatly to the development of the literature of São Tomé in particular and Portuguese-speaking Africa in general. His psychological insight, his willingness to see blackness as a serious literary subject, and his remembering of happy times in the tropical land of his birth are qualities adopted by later novelists and poets.

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São Tomé and Príncipe also produced writing in Portuguese during the first half of the 20th century. Caetano da Costa Alegre wrote poetry, published posthumously as Versos in 1916, that deals with the tension between Africa and Portugal. João Maria de Fonseca Viana de Almeida’s Maiá Pòçon: contos...